Wednesday, March 2, 2011

US Taxpayer Pay the US Military to Tell Them Lies

This is an incredible story published in the Washington Times. The US military paid good money for a contractor to "discover" that the 2008 financial meltdown was the result of some mysterious foreign terrorist group. Incredible. Tax dollars are spent by the US military to create fiction:

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”

While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.

“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place.

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran. Chinese military officials publicly have suggested using economic warfare against the U.S.

With the US federal government groaning under a huge deficit, you would think that the US military would be making sure that every dollar spent was spent very wisely. Nope. Some nutcases in the Pentagon hired other nutcases as "consultants" to write up a fiction to satisfy their urge to find boogymen as "foreign" conspirators who caused the 2008 Great Recession.

As the article points out, if you consult with a sane academic you get this assessment:

Paul Bracken, a Yale University professor who has studied economic warfare, said he saw “no convincing evidence that ‘outside forces’ colluded to bring about the 2008 crisis.”

“There were outside players in the market” for unregulated credit default swaps, Mr. Bracken said in an e-mail. “Foreign banks and hedge funds play the shorts all the time too. But suggestions of an organized targeted attack for strategic reasons don’t seem to me to be plausible.”

But I guess that the Pentagon was so "successful" at capturing Osama Bin Laden and bringing "democracy" to Iraq with the 2003 invasion, that they needed to turn their critical eye to "terrorists" who they are sure must have brought down the US economy in 2008.

If this is the level of "expertise" in the Pentagon, the US should disband its current military and rebuild it from the ground up!